Murder-free fun in the sun! Coney Island ends 2018 with no homicides; Brooklyn sees less than 100 killings

By Elizabeth Elizade , Mikey Light and Thomas Tracy

|new york daily news|

Jan 02, 2019 | 12:30 PM

Police investigate a crime scene at a W. 35th St. apartment building in Coney Island, where a man was fatally shot in the chest in 2017. This scene wasn't repeated last year as Coney Island saw no homicides in 2018. (Debbie Egan-Chin for New York Daily News)

Now there’s another reason to come to America’s Playground — Coney Island was murder-free for all of 2018.

Not a single murder was reported at Coney last year, officials said — a milestone that helped Brooklyn end the year with less than 100 homicides, local legislators said Wednesday.

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Eight killings were reported in Coney Island’s 60th Precinct in 2017, according to NYPD statistics.

As of Dec. 30, the city ended 2018 with 287 killings across the five boroughs — five less than in 2017, which saw the lowest number of homicides in the city since the 1950s. The NYPD’s year-end statistics were not immediately available on Wednesday.

“Working with the NYPD, we are continuing to see declines in most crimes, with another historic low in homicides,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said. “In Brooklyn, we are leading the way in implementing initiatives that strengthen trust in the criminal justice system while keeping communities safe.”

Overall, Brooklyn cops investigated 97 homicides with one day to go before the end of the year. Precincts in Borough Park and Park Slope also saw no homicides, just like in 2017.

There were also zero homicides in the Queens neighborhoods of Bayside and Forest Hills, three of the four precincts in Staten Island, and commands protecting residents in Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, West Side, Central Park and Central Harlem, according to police.

The 79th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant saw killings nearly double from five to nine, officials said. The 114th Precinct in Woodside, Queens, saw its murder rate more than triple, from three in 2017 to 10 last year, according to statistics.

Coney Island also saw a drop in shootings, from 11 in 2017 to three last year. Property crimes, however, were up with a 43% jump in burglaries — from 62 to 89.

Historically, Coney Island has been relatively safe, but there’s always been some grime under its sandy beaches.

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In 1990, just before the NYPD’s CompStat era began and every crime was tabulated and compared to the previous year, there were 21 homicides in the 60th Precinct — nearly 1% of the 2,262 killings that occurred that year.

Killings have fallen there ever since. In 1998, 16 murders were investigated in Coney Island. In 2001, 11 homicides had been reported, officials said.

Residents of Coney Island are happy to hear that murders in the city have dropped to zero — and say they feel safer in their community.

“I live in the projects but nothing really bad happened this year,” said Jentel Finch, 19, a student at Kingsborough Community College. “I feel very safe in my neighborhood. Sometimes I get home late and I feel safe.

"I feel like there's more cops on the streets so there's less violence and less killings. I'm pretty glad that they're out there," she said.

The number of rapes reported in the city — buoyed by the #MeToo movement and sexual assault arrests of high-profile celebrities like movie mogul Harvey Weinstein — saw a massive 22% increase in 2018, from 1,466 in 2017 to 1,788 last year, officials said.

NYPD Police Commissioner James O’Neill credited the continued reduction in crime to the thousands of cops who patrol the city every day.

“The skill and dedication of the men and women of the NYPD are keeping New York City the safest big city in America,” O’Neill said. “With stronger bonds of trust with the community created with neighborhood policing; a singular focus on violent crimes and those who commit them; and ever stronger coordination with our law enforcement partners, we can continue to drive crime down even lower in 2019.”